First screenshot was made with Apple JDK. Quartz Graphics Framework enabled by passing apple.awt.graphics.UseQuartz=true as a system property to render text and graphics. Anyway, fonts and colours under Apple JDK with Quartz look so different in java applications comparing to native ones. The good news is that fonts look natively with new Oracle JDK. It uses new approaches to render texts. Unfortunately, OpenGL doesn’t support SubPixel anti-aliasing, so you can have some problems with non-Retina displays.

Also Apple JDK with Quartz modifies colours while rendering and makes them more soft and warm. Look at the difference in backgrounds on the pictures. They have the same background colour… sort of…

A few days ago I installed Oracle JDK (version 1.7.0_40) built especially for early access purposes. So, it’s not the final release. The build contains tons of bug fixes and backports from JDK 8 for AWT/Swing and that was the main point why I started to play with it. As you might have heard, Retina support was one of the major issues in all 1.7.* releases. I’d say there was no Retina support before the build 1.7.0_40. I’m going to show you some differences of Retina support in Apple and Oracle JDKs.

1. isRetina() method

That’s funny, but there is no public API for it in Oracle JDK 7. Here is how we (IntelliJ IDEA team) do it under Apple JDK: